REVIEWED BY BARRY GARDNER:


RICHARD HILL – Kill the Hundredth Monkey. Randall Gatsby Sierra #3. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1995. No paperback edition.

   I don’t know anything about Hill, other than that he is described as a prize-winning author, and lives in Gainesville, Florida.

   Old three-names isn’t really looking for work right now, but some things a man’s just gotta do. One of the nation’s sports icons, a young white basketball player who was also a Rhodes scholar, has just been gunned down in Atlanta in an apparent random act of violence. Sierra is called down off his North Carolina mountaintop by n ex-movie star who lives not too far away in the mountains, where she presides over a group dedicated to stopping the destruction of personal liberty, civility, and various other Good Parts of American Life.

   The dead youth had come from their community, and she wants Sierra to investigate his death. It’s not his thing — he specializes in finding people — but he was one of the youth’s admirers himself, and can’t resist her entreaties. It’s a cold and dark trail, but he puts his nose to the ground and starts.

   I wish Hill weren’t quite as good a writer as he is, so I could just unload in this and be done with it. It’s filled with the Crumley/Parker macho, Brotherhood of Real Men bullshit that annoys me so much, and has pages and pages of commentary (in a not too lengthy book) on the ills of our society and how we have lost our way.

   I hate being preached to at the expense of the story, and particularly so by writers who get off on and glorify violence. I mean, hey, if we’ll all just do a little bonding and then kick some righteous ass, everything will be fine. You bet,

   But he is a good writer prose-wise, a very good one when he remembers to tell his story. His men and women are just a little too good, staunch, and caring to be true, but they’re the kind you want to root for. The plot really wasn’t all that bad, which is surprising: kick-ass books are usually more than a little silly when you look at them closely.

   Decidedly mixed feelings, that’s what I’ve got about this one.

— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #17, January 1995.


Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   I have discovered little more abut the author than Barry knew at the time he wrote this review. He is listed in Ak Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV as RICHARD (Fontaine) HILL (1941-1999?), along with the three books in his leading character’s series given below. Hill has escaped notice from both the Fantastic Fiction and Thrilling Detective websites, but both his second and third books were reviewed by Publishers Weekly.

      The Randall Gatsby Sierra series —

What Rough Beast, Foul Play, 1992
Shoot the Piper. St. Martin’s, 1994

Kill the Hundredth Monkey, St. Martin’s, 1995